What Is Email Quality Score?

Definition

Email quality score (EQS) is used to measure the quality of email campaigns and the relevance, importance, and legitimacy of emails. Low email quality scores can cause your email campaigns to be redirected to spam folders, while high scores help improve your emails’ visibility, open rates, and click-through rates by directing them to recipients’ inboxes.

Example

Say you’re running an email marketing campaign. You notice it’s not gaining traction—you’re getting low open rates and higher bounce rates. After analyzing your emails, you notice that your email quality score is on the lower side.

After making changes, such as sending valuable and personalized content to your recipients and including compelling CTAs, you see an improvement in your email quality score. This, in turn, boosts email deliverability and leads to better conversions and improved sender reputation.

Factors affecting email quality score

There are several factors that can affect your email quality score. These include:

• Sender reputation. Maintaining a positive reputation, which covers your credibility as a sender, sending history, and compliance with regulations, can lead to a higher EQS.
• Engagement metrics. Higher engagement metrics tell email service providers (ESPs) that your emails are relevant to your recipients. For example, high open rates indicate that your emails are compelling or relevant enough that your recipients open or engage with them.
• Spam complaints.A high volume of spam complaints affects your EQS. For example, when recipients mark your emails as spam, this could tell ESPs that your messages are unsolicited.

How to improve email quality score

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to improve your score, such as:

• Getting the timing right. Make sure your email is triggered by specific actions or is sent at specific times rather than sending them out randomly.
• Validating your email list. Clean your email list regularly to ensure that you only have accurate, active, and updated email addresses. This is also crucial to maintaining a healthy email list. Email list validation helps you eliminate spam traps and maintain an email list consisting of only valid and authentic emails.
• Split testing your emails. Make it a point to test different versions of your body copy and subject lines to see which ones capture recipients’ attention more effectively.
• Monitoring deliverability. Monitor the performance of your campaigns, including metrics like bounce rates and open rates. Doing so helps you identify and promptly address deliverability issues.

Related terms

• Email Engagement
• Reputation Monitoring
• Bounce Rate

Related articles

• How To Improve Email Deliverability
• Email Marketing Metrics to Track for Better Performance
• How To Check Email Sender Reputation